So, today I had to, though – I had to ask: What is it you don’t like about yourself? Is it your hair? Your color? What talent do you wish you didn’t have? What skill don’t you like?

Eventually, the answer boiled down to what a lot of us think of as “race,” race awareness. Some people force us to think about this early. Sometimes their reactions to us make us think about it all the time. Sometimes people shame us – for our melanin levels.

I’ve said it before (and, Yes, I’m rolling my eyes right now), melanin is ubiquitous. It’s a pigment. So, it’s a pigment that appears everywhere, in each one of us – to greater and lesser degrees. We don’t get to take credit for how much exists in us and how melanin displays itself to the world on some beautiful color spectrum.

But my kid has tied this to worth and placed its value above every gift, ability, strength, and God-given way of interacting with the world that she has inside.

So I said: I’m more brown than you. I’ve been told that I’m pretty before… Should I wish I was less brown, like you? Of course not, is her answer, just like when I rattle off other demographics on other brown folks she loves – her very dark-skinned uncle, even her sister to come in August… What if she’s as dark or darker than you? I ask, and she’s horrified by the implications of her own color paradigm and where her insecurity has led her, obviously.

“Its that they don’t call me brown,” she says. “They call me BLACK.”

“Hey! Momma doesn’t like that either. We’re SHADES of brown, for the most part,” I say. Before I take that down a path that could get tricky, though, I refocus: “But there ARE people who more closely resemble the color, black… Are THEY not beautiful or, necessarily bad? Should they be ashamed?”

I don’t know what the answer is, though. We’re processing. But I love that God the Holy Spirit gave me a surprising start to one of the many “tween” situations with which we’re grappling as a family: What God-given thing would you give back?

Sometimes, as parents, we need to turn thoughts on their heads for the sake of our children.